The Era of Storytelling & Transmedia

There is nothing ground breaking about storytelling in marketing, in fact we’re just going back to our roots! Think back to the fifty’s and the Marlboro Man. The Marlboro Man told the story of what masculinity was – a cowboy in Marlboro Country with a new cardboard flip-top box of cigarettes. Fast forward to today and any Pepsi commercial, life is better with a Pepsi in your hand and you can bridge any gap in life (let’s just forget the whole Pepsi/Kendall Jenner mishap).

Using multimedia to tell a story has occurred since cave people were painting and caving in to walls. Nowadays technology has allowed us to tell the story across multiple platforms and this is called transmedia. Even though technology improves monthly and software is becoming more user-friendly and accessible, the human brain simply hasn’t caught up. We as marketers need to up our game and tell compelling stories across multiple platforms with the human brain in mind.

I am not a psychologist but marketing does have a psychological component. This is why we as marketers need to have a basic understanding of psychology to be effective. The brain looks for content it can put together to create an experience in order to understand what story is being presented. This is important because the brain creates meaning and the success of transmedia efforts relies on resonance and authenticity created by the storyteller/s.

The way to successfully navigate storytelling in transmedia is through understanding psychology and why stories resonate.

Stories are a primal form of communication. This is how we have kept traditions alive, passed down myths and legends through many generations and how whenever I see a penny I pick it up, because who doesn’t want some good luck?!
Humans want to collaborate and connect. You can learn a stranger’s passion by just talking to them. You’ll see their emotions, you’ll feel their sadness or happiness through the stories they tell. This common ground is the essences of our humanity.
Cognitive pathways are the stories we tell ourselves over and over. It is these pathways that allow us to explain how things work, our rationale towards something, how we make decisions, etc. These pathways and stories help us understand the world around us and the values we have. Our job is to explain the story so the consumer can make a decision.
Stories provide order. Every story you have read has a beginning, middle and an end. Nothing groundbreaking here. What the human mind does through order is creates structure, predictability and comfort. It could almost be described that order is a safety net we create for ourselves. It is this reason why we need to communicate a beginning, middle and end in advertising on transmedia platforms.
Left brain, right brain. No matter which side comes easier to you, stories invoke the right side of the brain and stokes our imagination. When we as marketers tell stories correctly we help the person become a part of the narrative. And this is the nugget, when we successfully communicate our story we take a person into a place of self-discovery and self-improvement and then you simply 'insert your product here!'

Using transmedia to tell a story will bridge a gap and close differences, the challenge is using the technology to convey your story. It is one thing to spend a ton of money on a commercial or billboard, but if the consumer cannot navigate the story, you might as well have thrown those dollars down the drain. Storytelling using transmedia demands us to be authentic and to engage the consumer through basic pscyhology. When we share the core of our company’s story we create authentic meaning that consumers will believe in, participate with and share. This, my friends, is how to capitalize of the era of storytelling.